Our Age of Discord: A History of Possible Futures
Tue 4/7 • 1PM - 2:30PM PDT
Charles E. Young Research Library, Main Conference Room 11360
Presented by the UCLA Library and the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences
Social and political turbulence in the United States and Western Europe has been rising over the past decade. Cliodynamics, the new transdisciplinary field, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability and resilience to internal and external shocks.
In this talk, Peter Turchin will look beneath the surface of day-to-day contentious politics and social unrest, and focus on the negative social and economic trends that explain our current “Age of Discord.” One of the most important, but little appreciated, such hidden forces is a perverse “wealth pump” that transfers wealth from the “99 percent” to “1 percent.” If allowed to run unchecked, the wealth pump results in both relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites. Since the number of power positions in a society remains more or less fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order.
In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. In fact, today the USA finds itself in a situation that fits the definition of revolution, although, so far, fortunately a relatively non-violent one.
The current focus of Turchin's research team is, how do we navigate our Age of Discord without descending into a hot civil war?